Introduction

Most secular scholars believe that the Hebrew Old Testament is merely a
collection of revisionist, fragmented history, along with folklore and
theology. Often, biblical dates for historic events are often assumed to be
incorrect. Previous excavations of Edom have been conducted on the highland
plateaus of Jordan, which had been controlled by the neo-Assyrian empire
during the eighth and seventh B.C.1 So, archeologists assumed that dating of the kingdom of Edom
was at least 200 years later than the date given in the
Old Testament. New archeological excavations have examined the copper ore-rich
lowlands of Jordan, discovering a large Iron Age copper production center.

New evidence

Canadian archeologist Russell Adams, along with Thomas Levy of the
University of California at San Diego and Mohammad Najjar of the Jordanian
Department of Antiquities recently discovered a monumental tenth century B.C.
fortress at a site called Khirbat en-Nahas (30 miles south of the Dead Sea in
Jordan).2 The use of high-precision radiocarbon
dating
(14C) methods on some of the
relics firmly established that occupation of the site had began in the eleventh
century B.C.

Conclusion

These early dates establish the existence of the Edomite kingdom at the
time King David and his son Solomon ruled over Israel. The Old Testament claims that David
conquered the Edomites and placed garrisons there.3 The
Bible claims that David ruled from ~1010 B.C. to 970 B.C., which is directly
correlated with the dates determined at Khirbat en-Nahas. Now that 14C
dating is being used to accurately determine archeological sites in the Middle
East, we should be getting a better idea of the accuracy of Old Testament
histories.